COL 49 Chapter 4 Starters

[calbert at hslboxmaster.com]

MalignD
> Calbert:  <<Not so fast, mon ami............from the source you cited 
> yesterday.....>>
> 
> Not exactly the same source, it should be said.

man, Salgado was rather promiscuous.....I'd never have guessed 
that we would hold two different essays on the same topic, with 
such disparate conclusions....my bad......and sadly I cannot even 
tell you where I got my Salgado article....

> --says in the essay I cited:  
> 
> "For all [Kyd's] undeniable theatrical skill and occasional insight
> into character, Kyd has no purpose much deeper than making our hair
> stand on end ..."
> 
> And, although you cite Salgado saying:
> 
> "To his Senecan stock Kyd drafted a character, Lorenzo, who  embodied
> the contemporary interest in Machiavelli. ...  Lorenzo is thus the
> ancestor of the unscrupulous figure ... a tribe  to which belong the
> most dazzling dramatic creations of the period -  Flamineo, De Flores,
> Edmund, and Iago among a host of others."
> 
> I am reading him now saying: 
> 
> "... that since Marlowe put Machiavel on the stage (in the prologue to
> the Jew of Malta, 1588-9), the Machiavellian figure has been the
> embodiment of conscious and intricately contrived villainy ...  Thus
> Richard III, Iago, and Edmund are typical Machiavellian characters." 
> (Salgado dates The Spanish Tragedy as circa 1589.)
> 
> He then says in a footnote:  "Though in part the Maciavellian figure
> has an older ancestry, going back to the "Vice" of medieval Morality
> drama ..."
> 
> Mediterranean excess would seem to be not the least of reasons for
> Salgado's relative anonymity.

I cited in entirety......no tricks, I promise......I'd say as a primary 
source he is suspect....thanks.......

> Also:  "[Kyd] is also widely believed to have been the author of an
> earlier  version of Hamlet (sometimes referred to as the Ur-Hamlet) on
>  which Shakespeare drew when he came to write his celebrated 
> tragedy....."
> 
> Harold Bloom on the same subject writes:  
> 
> "The origins of Shakespeare's most famous play are as shrouded as
> Hamlet's textual condition is confused.  There is an earlier Hamlet
> that Shakespeare's drama revises and overgoes, but we do not have this
> trial work, nor do we know who composed it.  Most scholars believe
> that its author was Thomas Kyd, who wrote the archetypal revenge play
> The Spanish Tragedy.  I think, though, that Peter Alexander was
> correct in his surmise that Shakespeare himself wrote the Ur-Hamlet,
> no later than 1589, when he was first starting as a dramatist.  Though
> scholarly opinion is mostly against Alexander on this ..." 


This I see only as Bloom's conjecture...he may or may not be 
right.....

can we call it a draw?


love,
cfa